The Nephrology Congress

Fresenius Medical Care is launching »Life/2021«, an international congress where participants will discuss the future of kidney disease treatment with a faculty of almost 100 internationally renowned scientists. A hybrid concept of online and onsite event, which, due to its sustainable orientation, is not designed as a temporary event, but as a permanently developing campus. In collaboration with the agency New Cat Orange, we are developing a design in which this campus becomes visible not as abstract framing but as concrete architecture.

A campus made of paper becomes a stage for science

An ensemble of buildings and interior spaces is created from the finest paper and with state-of-the-art laser technology, which serves as a stage for the content of four teasers, the congress guide and as a framework for other moving image content of the event. And it is perfect for staging the hybrid congress format cinematographically. So, for one week, we transformed our conference room in the Walkmühle into a trick film studio - and discovered that very small things are not necessarily easier to film than very large ones.

In addition to the teaser films, we also used the paper campus to record Life/TV, the moving image format for the congress itself. For this purpose, we had white steles for the individual buildings and brought the architectural model to the daylight studio co.fabrik in Mainz. There, in just two days of filming, 16 streams of moderation parts, interviews as well as yoga and pilates sessions are created with a total running time of 5 hours.

Watch out, here comes nerd talk!

The campus on an approximate scale of 1:50 is placed in a white cove on an extremely heavy table. Since we need a high magnification and extreme macro capabilities for this reduction and also want to drive through doors that are only two centimetres wide, the only optic that comes into question is the Laowa 24mm f/14 2X Macro lens. On the camera side, in order to be able to shoot at high frame rates in 4K with an aperture of f/14, we opt for the FS7 Mark II.

Equipped with a radio focus, we place the camera on a remote head for the pan and tilt movements, which is mounted on a likewise remote-controlled mini-slider, which in turn sits on a jib, a small camera crane with a corresponding load-bearing capacity. The smallest wobbles in this monstrous set-up prove to be particularly challenging, as they are mercilessly magnified by the almost half-metre-long optics with their gigantic image scale of 1:2. Considering that three people are needed to move the camera at the same time (jib movement, slider and head movement, radio focus), you can imagine that we felt more like surgeons than a film team for most of the time. Perhaps just the right working perspective for the production of films for a medical congress.